Ripley Recap: Every Man Is an Island

Is it okay to say that this post-murder-identity-swap Tom is charming? Read more in Vulture’s recap of Netflix’s ‘Ripley.’

I am committed to being a Marge hater, so it brings me no joy to say this: I feel bad for her. There is genuine confusion and hurt in her eyes when Tom waltzes back into Atrani to pack up Dickie’s things at the beginning of “La Dolce Vita.” He doesn’t spare her any sympathy when he tells her that Dickie has decided to move to Rome for a while, that the Cortina trip is off, and that they have no plan other than to enjoy the Italian capital together for a bit. But she doesn’t let herself feel hurt for too long before she turns suspicious. For that matter, when Tom hands Ermelinda, the housekeeper, a wad of cash and tells her Dickie won’t be needing her services anymore, she is suspicious, too. There aren’t a lot of women around Tom Ripley save for Mrs. Greenleaf, who is too nervous about her son’s whereabouts to notice, the ones that are can tell that he’s up to no good. But Marge has put up a front with him from the very start, so it’s not surprising to him that when he basically tells her that Dickie doesn’t want to see her anymore, she has reason to doubt his motives. Her reaction is part of his own calculation.

It’d be tempting to say that the murderous impulse that took over Tom as he killed Dickie was the product of a temporary moment of madness; that feeling provoked by Dickie and shut out of the world of which he so badly wanted to be a part drove him crazy. But seeing him sail through the aftermath, all sympathy goes down the drain. The methodical Tom Ripley, who picked up rock after rock to sink the boat where he killed Dickie, is the same man that moves easily through Atrani under the guise of taking over Dickie’s preparations to move to Rome. He doesn’t hesitate: After packing up Dickie’s belongings — including the Picasso that hung on the wall, of course — he approaches Carlo, the mafioso who had propositioned him to take a bag to Paris, to help sell Dickie’s boat. Carlo tries a little but can’t out-con Tom; a 20 percent commission is out of the question. Tom then arranges for the staff at the Miramare to go to Dickie’s villa and buy as much furniture as they want, except, of course, the Picasso.

Already feeling loose with Dickie’s cash, Tom buys six first-class tickets to Rome and practices Dickie’s signature on the train. On the station’s platform, he ditches his own bag by flinging it onto a passing luggage cart. As he goes through the motions, Tom seems anything but nervous: He’s armored with a scary tranquility, the ease of someone who is this close to getting what he wants. He practices a confident smirk in the mirror, emboldened by the uneventfulness of his journey. It’s when he arrives at what appears to be the swankiest hotel in Rome that his intention becomes fully clear: Using the pen we saw him take from Dickie’s desk in the first episode, he checks in under Dickie Greenleaf’s name. The hotel concierge takes Dickie’s passport from Tom’s hand, neglecting to check the picture. Tom is so pleased with himself that he chuckles as he looks around his palatial room — he can hardly believe his luck.

At the center of Tom’s relationship with and murder of Dickie is a confusion familiar to anyone who has ever had a crush: He both wants Dickie and to be Dickie, and is finally subsumed by the latter urge. D.H. Lawrence once wrote that “you have to kill a thing to know it satisfactorily”; well then, Tom knows Dickie. The problem is that there is a paradox in the aftermath of satisfying a desire that, for most people, only exists in the abstract. When Dickie was alive, Tom coveted his life in part because of the way it connected with others. Dickie was treated a certain way by other people of the same upper class. The same status is still elusive for Tom. Although he uses Dickie’s name, wearing his clothes, his signet ring, and bearing his passport, Tom’s burden is that he has to be utterly alone. He can’t go and see other people, not as Dickie and not in Italy: Soon enough, the small community of expats would catch up with him. His existence as Dickie is a necessarily isolated one. But the whole point of being Dickie was to be surrounded by love, respect, and sycophants. If there is no one to witness Tom being Dickie, then is Tom Dickie at all?

In any case, the road to being Dickie isn’t all smooth. Marge manages to track him down at the hotel shortly after his arrival in Rome — this is another one of those classic Ripley-ean miscalculations, like she wouldn’t know to look for Dickie in the capital’s chicest establishment. To the hotel concierge, who hands him a note from Marge, he improvises some story about his mother being ill and hastily checks out. Thinking more clearly now, he finds a dingier hotel tucked into the dark corner of a set of stairs (which surely brings back fond memories of Atrani …). What follows is a series of errands that, taken together, bring to mind one of my favorite cinematic tropes: the preparation montage. Think of Danny and Rusty putting together the crew for their ambitious three-casino heist in Ocean’s Eleven or the montage in Toy Story 2 when that sweet old man fixes Woody. Tom gets his picture taken and glues it over Dickie’s on his passport. He takes Dickie’s watch to get fixed and cashes Dickie’s checks in the bank. It’s sort of endearing how fixated he is on using Dickie’s pen at any and all opportunities. As if to confirm the gamble on his own fate, people keep remarking on what a nice pen it is. Everything’s looking up Tom!

After settling all of his things, Tom begins a much riskier and more difficult project, which is to “correct” several perspectives of him; in other words, to use Dickie’s voice to confront his own haters. In her letter to Dickie, Marge had written about him in varying degrees of insult: Is he sure that Tom isn’t queer? Is he even “normal enough” to have a sex life? Why is Dickie ignoring his father’s warnings about Tom? Because Marge had never failed to make her ill feelings toward Tom exceedingly obvious, their war had been declared from the very start: He’s not surprised that she says vile things about him behind his back. But back in New York, he and Mr. Greenleaf had shared something of a bond. The paternal instinct that had been either intentionally summoned or naturally emerged from their interactions had colored Tom’s view of Dickie’s parents with affection. Now he finds out that Mr. Greenleaf is not an ally but, inadmissibly, an opponent. “I don’t know if you know this, but he’s an orphan,” Tom writes to his parents as Dickie, on the topic of how his presence has enlightened him on the importance of family. “Somehow, of all of my friends, you found the right one to send,” he finishes with a flourish.

If all our sympathy for Tom was zapped by the brutality of his murder of Dickie, at this point, his cheekiness becomes charming again. It’s also, I have to admit, pretty funny. With her letter, in which she roasted Tom to a crisp, Marge had sent Dickie a scarf that she’d spent months knitting. After wearing it briefly around his neck, Tom tosses it dramatically onto the street. To the concierge at his new hotel, he hands a picture of Marge, spinning a story about their break-up and saying that if she comes looking for him, to please not tell her he’s here. To the Greenleafs, he writes that he’s looking for an apartment in Rome. To everyone involved, he makes sure to say that Tom is not only a good guy but a heroic one: the kind of person whose company opens up life’s possibilities and attunes a person to the beauty of their own surroundings. The arrogance that is natural to a boy of Dickie’s background and opportunity becomes Tom; it comes easily. He has the satisfied air of someone whose life is going exactly the way he wants it to.

The only time Tom breaks character while in Rome is when he calls Carlo to see about the boat. Carlo tries to get some money out of the deal, but again, he finds it impossible to go around Tom, even if he can tell that whatever Tom is doing with this money is not exactly pure. With the check that Carlo sends over, Tom opens a bank account under his own name. Now he has two streams of income: Dickie’s and his own. In “La Dolce Vita,” Tom-as-Dickie is constantly surrounded by Catholic imagery, haunted by the face of the Virgin and by Caravaggio’s dramatic depictions of biblical struggle. This episode clarifies a hunch I’d brought up in my dislike for Dickie in episode two: The season’s full stride was impeded by the development of the relationship between Tom, Dickie, and Marge. Without having to make a case for the plausibility of the trio, the emotional detachment that Zaillian brings to the show finds a much more satisfying rhythm. The murder having been committed, Tom can fully relax into his maniacal persona. As the episode draws to a close, a museum guide explains to a group of visitors that Caravaggio had used his own face at different periods of his life to depict both David and Goliath. Maybe that’s how Tom thinks of himself for now: not exactly as Dickie, and not exactly as Tom, but a Janus face of them both. Tom and Dickie are now a composite, twinned for life.